Poem: "Suck It Up" by Paul Zimmer from Crossing to Sunlight: Selected Poems. © University of Georgia Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Suck It Up

Two pugs on the undercard step through
The ropes in satin robes,
Pink Adidas with tassels,
Winking at the women in the crowd.
At instructions they stare down hard
And refuse to touch their gloves,
Trying to make everyone believe
That this will be a serious dust-up.

But when the bell rings they start
Slapping like a couple of Barbie Dolls.
One throws a half-hearted hook,
The other flicks out his jab,
They bounce around for a while
Then grab each other for a tango.
The crowd gets tired of booing
and half of them go out for a beer,
But I've got no place to hide.

A week after a cancer scare,
A year from a detached retina,
Asthmatic, overweight, trickling,
Drooling, bent like a blighted elm
In my pajamas and slippers,
I have tuned up my hearing aids to sit in
Numbness without expectation before
These televised Tuesday Night Fights.

With a minute left in the fourth,
Scuffling, they butt their heads
By accident. In midst of all the catcalls
And hubbub suddenly they realize
How much they hate each other.

They start hammering and growling,
Really dealing, whistling combinations,
Hitting on the breaks and thumbing.
At least one guy crosses a stiff jab
With a roundhouse right and the other
Loses his starch. The guy wades into
The wounded one, pounding him
Back and forth until he goes down,
Bouncing his head hard on the canvas.

The count begins but he is saved
By the bell and his trainers haul
Him to his stool as the lens zooms in.

I come to the edge of my La-Z-Boy,
Blinking and groaning from my incision,
Eager for wise, insightful instruction.

He gets a bucket of water in his face,
A sniff on the salts while the cutman
Tries to close his wounds with glue.
His nose is broken, eyes are crossed,
His lips bleed like two rare steaks.
His cornermen take turns slapping his cheeks.
"Suck it up!" they shout.
"Suck it up!"

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of poet Joyce Sutphen, (books by this author) born in St. Cloud, Minnesota (1949). She's the author of Straight Out of View (1995), Coming Back to the Body (2000), and Naming the Stars (2003). Sutphen spent her childhood on a farm near St. Joseph, Minnesota. She said, "Like many of the people I had read about, I set out on a long journey to find truth and beauty. As usual, the road led straight back to the beginning: home, country roads, the sun setting through the woods."

It's the birthday of Herbert Hoover, (books by this author) born in West Branch, Iowa (1874), son of a Quaker blacksmith. In 1928 he ran for president with a reputation as a humanitarian for saving millions of Europeans from starvation during and after World War I. During the campaign, Hoover said: "We are nearer today to the ideal of the abolition of poverty and fear from the lives of men and women than ever before in any land." A year later, the 1929 stock market crash sent the country into the worst economic collapse in its history.

On this day in 1912, Virginia Stephen married Leonard Woolf. She was thirty, he was thirty-one, and they married at London's St. Pancras Registry Office. Together, the couple founded the Hogarth Press in their dining room. They taught themselves how to print. Their first project was a printed and bound pamphlet containing a story by each of them. They published Virginia Woolf's (books by this author) novels, a collection of Freud's papers, and the works of writers who were then unknown, including Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot, and E.M. Forster.

It's the birthday of one of Brazil's best-loved writers: Jorge Amado, (books by this author) born near Ilhéus, Brazil (1912). He is one of the most widely translated novelists in the world; they called him the "Pelé of the written word." His thirty-two books sold millions of copies in forty languages. Brazilian hotels, bars, and restaurants, as well as brands of whiskey and margarine, were named for characters from his books. He's the author of Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon (1958), Home is the Sailor (1961), and Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (1966).

FRIDAY, 11 AUGUST, 2006
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Poem: "To Walt Whitman in Heaven" by Betsy Sholl from Late Psalm. © The University of Wisconsin Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

To Walt Whitman in Heaven

Things that look good and aren't: high fashion,
Manifest Destiny, limp wires the electrician thinks
are dead till he grabs hold and then, O Infinite—
coursing-through-finite—thank God his spastic dance

is only a shock—one yelp and he shakes
it off. Not so easy for the girl next door
feeling her first kiss begin to fester
as the young man's buddies drive by hooting

and one calls out, how far did ya get? Whadda
we owe? It's enough to make everything
look bad. So, a list then of what turns out
to be good: the loud-mouthed parrot

down the block that scared off two robbers,
the junior prom I spent alone in my room
reading you, Walt Whitman, your great
barbaric yawp entering my mind like salt

water coursing through fresh, stinging my wounds,
till every image was sharp—the lunatic,
the lily-faced boy in the makeshift hospital,
contralto, runaway, cloud scud, your voice

whispering through sea spray to ferry crowds,
just as you feel, so I felt ... What doesn't change
and remain, remain and grow strange? The lace
bodice from my mother's slip my daughter

now sews onto the cuffs of her new jeans,
the crooked front tooth that has traveled through
how many kisses from my mother's mouth
to mine, and on to my son. What is a list?

The neighbor girl goes through her catalog
of moves under the hoop—sky hooks, lay-ups,
fall-away jumpers. Long after dark, she's out there
dribbling her heart on the asphalt, tossing it up,

nothing but net. Painful, yes, but how else
will she get to that sweet agony within,
your great loitering contradictions? She dodges
and spins, as if shedding a skin, steps around

the driveway to keep the motion light flaring
as she passes from shadow into Technicolor,
banks a shot, jabs the air to cheer herself on,
point guard, center and crowd all in one,

and I almost see you in the dark,
on the fringe, though I can hardly say what
you mean, in the sweet mysterious night vapor
hovering over blacktop and lamp-green lawn.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of short-story writer Andre Dubus, (books by this author) born in Lake Charles, Louisiana (1936). He wrote stories about regular people like bartenders, mechanics, and waitresses in collections such as The Cage Keeper and Other Stories (1989) and Dancing after Hours (1996). In 1986, after publishing several books of short stories, Dubus stopped to help a woman and a man stranded on the side of the highway, and he was hit by a passing car. He saved the woman's life by throwing her out of the way, but he lost one of his legs and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. He said, "Some of my characters now feel more grateful about simple things—breathing, buying groceries, sunlight, because I do." He also said, "We don't have to live great lives, we just have to understand and survive the ones we've got."

It's the birthday of poet Louise Bogan, (books by this author) born in Livermore Falls, Maine (1897). She wrote many books of poetry, including The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968 (1968). For many years she was the poetry critic for The New Yorker magazine. Bogan said, "Surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy."

It's the birthday of British short-story writer and novelist Angus Wilson, (books by this author) born in Bexhill, Sussex, England (1913). He's known for his satirical fiction about the English middle class in novels like Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956).

It's the birthday of the Scottish poet who wrote under the name Hugh MacDiarmid. He was born Christopher Murray Grieve, in Langholm, Scotland (1892). He started out writing poetry in English, but he felt there was something wrong with it. Then one day, he tried writing poetry in the Scottish dialect that he had spoken when he was a child. Writing in dialect freed him from the restraint he felt when writing in English. At the time, the literary establishment looked down on people writing in Scottish dialect, so Grieve published his poetry under the name "Hugh MacDiarmid." His masterpiece was A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926).

SATURDAY, 12 AUGUST, 2006
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Poem: "Where We Are (after Bede)" by Stephen Dobyns, from Velocities. © Viking Penguin, 1994. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Where We Are
(after Bede)

A man tears a chunk of bread off the brown loaf,
then wipes the gravy from his plate. Around him
at the long table, friends fill their mouths
with duck and roast pork, fill their cups from
pitchers of wine. Hearing a high twittering, the man

looks to see a bird—black with a white patch
beneath its beak—flying the length of the hall,
having flown in by a window over the door. As straight
as a taut string, the bird flies beneath the roofbeams,
as firelight flings its shadow against the ceiling.

The man pauses—one hand holds the bread, the other
rests upon the table—and watches the bird, perhaps
a swift, fly toward the window at the far end of the room.
He begins to point it out to his friends, but one is
telling hunting stories, as another describes the best way

to butcher a pig. The man shoves the bread in his mouth,
then slaps his hand down hard on the thigh of the woman
seated beside him, squeezes his fingers to feel the firm
muscles and tendons beneath the fabric of her dress.
A huge dog snores on the stone hearth by the fire.

From the window comes the clicking of pine needles
blown against it by an October wind. A half moon
hurries along behind scattered clouds, while the forest
of black spruce and bare maple and birch surrounds
the long hall the way a single rock can be surrounded

by a river. This is where we are in history—to think
the table will remain full; to think the forest will
remain where we have pushed it; to think our bubble of
good fortune will save us from the night—a bird flies in
from the dark, flits across a lighted hall and disappears.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of English poet Robert Southey, (books by this author) born in Bristol, England (1774). He was one of the leading poets of his day, along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, and was poet laureate of England. Today, we've forgotten almost everything he wrote except for one short children's story he published anonymously called "The Story of the Three Bears" (1837). He said his uncle had told him the story as a child. It was about an old woman who invades the house of three bears, tries out their porridge, their chairs, and their beds, and then jumps out the window when they come home.

At the end of the story, Southey wrote, "Out the little old woman jumped; and whether she broke her neck in the fall, or ran into the wood and was lost there, or found her way out of the wood and was taken up by the constable and sent to the House of Correction for a vagrant as she was, I cannot tell. But the Three Bears never saw anything more of her." The story was rewritten many times by other authors. In the later versions, the old woman became a little girl, and she was named "Goldilocks."

It's the birthday of comic novelist Wallace Markfield, (books by this author) born in Brooklyn (1926). He's best known for his first novel, To An Early Grave (1964), about four men who spend the day driving across Brooklyn to their friend's funeral. He also wrote Teitlebaum's Window (1970) and You Could Live If They Let You (1974). For most of his writing life, he felt that he was writing in the shadow of his literary idol, Saul Bellow.

It's the birthday of the woman who invented the characters Dick and Jane to help teach children how to read, Zerna Sharp, born in Hillisburg, Indiana (1889). Sharp's idea was to use pictures and repetition to teach children new words. She took her idea to Dr. William S. Gray, who had been studying the way children learn to read, and he hired her to create a series of textbooks. She didn't write the books, but she created the characters Dick, Jane, their sister Sally, their dog Spot, and their cat Puff. Each story introduced five new words, one on each page.

It's the birthday of classics scholar Edith Hamilton, (books by this author) born in Dresden, Germany (1867). Her parents were both Americans, and she grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Hamilton started learning Latin and Greek when she was seven years old, and she went on to study classics in Europe. She was the first woman admitted to the University of Munich. After college, Hamilton moved back to the United States and worked for years as the head mistress of a prep school. In her spare time, she read Greek philosophy and literature. It wasn't until after her retirement that she began to publish books about Greek civilization like The Greek Way (1930).

SUNDAY, 13 AUGUST, 2006
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Poem: "Touch Me" by Stanley Kunitz, from Staying Alive, Real Poems for Unreal Times. © Miramax Books, 2003. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Touch Me

Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that's late,
it is my song that's flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
                 and it's done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It was on this day in 1961 that East Germany sealed off the border between East and West Berlin. Germany had been divided since the end of World War II: East Germany was controlled by the Soviet Union and West Germany was controlled by a democratic Government. The city of Berlin lay inside East Germany, but West Germany controlled half the city. If people living in Communist countries in Eastern Europe could get to West Berlin, they could then escape to West Germany. Between 1949 and 1961, about 2.5 million people left East Germany through West Berlin. The government of East Germany built the Berlin Wall around West Berlin to stop the flight of skilled labor, which threatened its economy.

The first part of the wall was built at 2 a.m. on this day in 1961, made of cinder blocks and barbed wire. It was later replaced with a fifteen-foot concrete wall with watchtowers, guns, electric wire, and mines. It came to symbolize the Cold War's division of Eastern Europe from Western Europe. Between 1961 and 1989, almost two hundred people were killed trying to cross the wall.

When the wall finally came down in November of 1989, people rushed into West Berlin. Capitalism took over almost immediately, when entrepreneurs began collecting pieces of the wall and shipping them to the United States to be sold as souvenirs. More than twenty tons of the wall were shipped to America, just in time for the Christmas shopping season, to be sold, along with an "informative booklet and a declaration of authenticity," for $10 to $15 in gift shops and department stores.

It was on this day in 1940 that Germany began to bomb England during World War II, beginning the Battle of Britain. France had just been conquered, and Germany's plan was to destroy Great Britain's Royal Air Force before it began a land invasion of the country.

The British had the most advanced radar systems in the world, which helped them shoot down many of the German bombers, but by the middle of August they had lost a quarter of their planes. The British pilots were flying so many missions a day that as soon as they landed they fell asleep in their cockpits. Churchill said, "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."

Everything changed on August 24th, when a German bomber accidentally bombed London. Britain responded by bombing Berlin. Hitler was so angry that he ordered his air force to bomb London exclusively, turning his attention away from the Royal Air Force. Historians say that if Hitler had focused on destroying the Royal Air Force, he probably would have won the battle. Instead, the British weathered the bombing raids until the United States could join the war, and the Germans were eventually defeated.

Today is believed to be the birthday of the first man ever to print a book in English, William Caxton, born in Kent, England (1422). He was a wealthy trader and merchant, and also a part-time linguist and translator. He was living in Cologne, Germany, when he translated a book about the history of Troy. The printing press had been invented about twenty-five years earlier, but it had only recently started to spread beyond Germany. Caxton realized that the new technology of printing would make the job of distributing his books a lot easier. So instead of copying the book by hand, he printed the book he had translated about Troy in 1475. He eventually went back to England, where he established the first English printing press. He printed all the available English literature, including Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (c. 1478). For a long time, people in England called printed books "Caxtons."

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch^®.

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